


Mémoire

by noblewriting



Category: Beauty and the Beast (2017), Beauty and the Beast - All Media Types, La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Amnesia, Home, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Memory Magic, au? i guess?, look there are just a lot of memories in this fic ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 22:48:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20299201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noblewriting/pseuds/noblewriting
Summary: after the curse is broken, another curse is set in place. as punishment for the villagers being so cruel to belle, they are all turned into inanimate objects, and the castle forgets about them and continues on with their lives. To break the spell, Belle will have to remember her childhood, her father, and a village she thought she would never want to see again.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at lumiereswig.tumblr.com. This is one of my favorites—hope you enjoy.

“Did I have a papa, once?” Chip asks his mum. He’s not sure why, but playing with his little toy donkey—carved from wood, with little wheels for legs—has stirred something in him. 

“All little boys have papas,” says Mrs. Potts absently. She is busy drying the dishes, and doesn’t look up from her saucers and plates. “Why would you think of that now?”

Chip tries to string the words together. Something like _where is he now, then? _Or _who is he?_ Or _why don’t we talk about him? Is he dead?_

He can’t think of any of the words. His eyes go back to the donkey, and he forgets what he was asking.

* * *

Jean Potts is not dead. But sometimes, he feels he might as well be. 

There is something about being a plate that feels _particularly_ humiliating. The fact that his lovely porcelain border is striped in the same way his old hat was does nothing to diminish the embarrassment.

He didn’t even _like_ that hat, that much. But now it’s all he is: a white plate with a striped border, and painted eyes and mouth, and nothing else besides. He wish he had thought to bring a change of clothes before encountering the old hag from the mountains.

Agathe hadn’t turned him into a plate. This curse was done by someone else entirely: a hag with corkscrew, blue-streaked hair, and a cranky nose, and a spitfire temper that doomed them all. They didn’t know her name. Just that she was malicious, and had curses to burn. 

“If I had known she was like this,” argued Clothilde, newly a fishhook, “we could have bought her jam, or sommat.”

“I don’t think jam was what she wanted,” said Jean. 

The curse had been swift and brutal and ironic in its care to detail. Everyone knew what it was _for_: to tell them, in no uncertain terms, that Mobs Are Bad, and Hating People You Barely Know Is Bad, and Falling In Line With Tyrants Is Bad, and Being Stupid Is Bad. (the hag had really gone on quite a while before she actually cast the curse.) It was a taste of their own medicine, for acting like tools in the hands of a crazed, angry man.

That didn’t help assuage the feelings of _plate_, though. 

Some had it worse. Alléchant Agriculteur, the local supplier of eggs, couldn’t complain at all; nobody had ever seen such an unbelievably attractive hen coop in their lives. But Forgeron Rouge, the blacksmith so beloved for his bright red cap and helpful manner, had turned into an anvil. He couldn’t _move_. The horses—now all just horseshoes, poor creatures—whinnied around him pitifully, and all he could do was clang in response.

The hatstands in the window tittered and sighed. They still wanted to be _pretty_, and here they were, with big bonnets as always, but no pretty black hair to make it worth while. They wondered if Chapeau, their brother, might find them. They wondered if Chapeau still remembered them.

He didn’t. 

Sometimes—given to subtle turns of thought, as he was—Chapeau wondered how the castle was meant to survive, in a forest with no villages around. Surely that affected the local economy? Where was Cuisinier meant to buy his eggs and bread, with no farms around to supply it? Given that, where did the servants come from? They couldn’t all come straight from Paris, like Lumiere and Plumette. There had to be some village boys, with pretty mothers—milliners maybe—who could come up to the palace to find work. He had to give it some thought. There was a riddle here he needed to remember.

He didn’t. He forgot. 

It was odd, at nights, when some told stories of their families. Mrs. Potts talked about her mother at length—the weaver-woman from Yorkshire, who she hadn’t seen for so long, ever since she left the country and came here. Lumiere, if pressed, will laugh and mock his father, the old man in Paris who wears spectacles and worn brown vests and who he loves so much, so complicatedly, so completely. Even Belle remembers a little of her mother, even though she died so far away.

But nobody seems to come from around the palace. There are no village boys.

The village boys are buckets, and dishrags, and washing-mangles, and clothes-lines. Pointless objects, now that there is no one to cook or clean or work for. And too small, always too small, to venture across the wood—though many thought about it, stirring with strange bravery. 

The schoolmaster—a walking lectern—stares out at the forest, the wooden knots he uses for eyes bleak. “I just _found_ her again,” he says. He is speaking of his daughter. “She made everything _new_.” 

Beth La Mûre, the jam-maker, tries to keep everyone’s spirits up. With endless romance, she suggests that perhaps people will fall in love with each other now, now that the forms show who they really are. She tallies up relationships and nudges dustpans and broomsticks together. Being a spice rack seems to do very little to change her mind.

“They have to remember us _sometime_,” murmurs Steve. He was done with being a keg of beer about one second after it started. He wonders if he could even taste the stuff, anymore, now that it flows where his veins used to be. 

“One of them will save us,” says his wife. She has turned into an accordion, and every word is accompanied by a wail. “LeFou, or the Prince, or even Belle herself.”

But no one comes. The palace does not remember.

* * *

“Why don’t we ever leave?” Belle stands at the window, staring out at the dark forest. She looks beautiful in the summer sun, and Adam is overwhelmed with fondness for her.

“There are wolves out there, dearest,” says Adam. “You know that as well as anyone.” 

“I know, but….there must be _something_ out there,” she says. “I don’t just mean Vienna, or Paris, or London—what’s in the heart of the forest?”

“The forest holds tight to its secrets,” says Adam, and he shivers a little. Agathe still looms large in his nightmares. 

Belle leans against the window and sighs. “I know what the great, wide somewhere is like,” she says. “I wonder if there’s a little town.”


	2. Chapter 2

They try to keep together some sense of routine. Stanley, and Dick, and Tom—cheaply made swords, now, the lot of them—still patrol the streets, still check in on Pere Robert (the poor, dusty altar in the poor, dusty church). The villagers still gather in the market, still pretend they have wares to sell and not wares to embody. A basket of ten-yard ribbons sighs and shakes its lid; _no good,_ she seems to say, and wanders away. 

Jean Potts talks to everyone. He’s found he can get around on a little rolling cart, and he thinks how proud his wife would be, if she knew that he had figured this out himself._ I wonder if she ever used a trick like this!_ he thinks, bumping and rolling over the Villeneuve dirt. He wonders if she misses him.

He talks to Stanley. _LeFou will come_, says the sword engraved with sideburns. _He‘ll remember me._

He talks to Clothilde. _Oh, Henri, yes! Yes! Henri’s punctual. He won’t forget to come._

He talks to the paintbrush, the one that never leaves his house._ I don’t know, Jean. I really don’t know. I don’t know so many things._

_Your daughter…?_

_I don’t know, Jean.   
_

Jean Potts’ little cart squeaks as he rolls away.

* * *

Adam finds her in the rose garden, crying over _Romeo and Juliet. _

“You’ve already read it,” he says gently, settling in beside her. “Surely there aren’t any surprises left?”

Belle shakes her head, fiercely, like a wounded animal. She cradles the book, then shoves it into his arms.

“Mercutio say something particularly poetic?”

“It’s not the story,” she chokes out. “It’s….I loved reading this book, the first time. It felt special. Like a gift.”

Adam smiles. “People love giving you books, don’t they?”

She can’t help a small smile at that. But there’s still tears in her throat, and she coughs and fights and clenches her fists against the bench.

“I miss….I miss the first time I read this book. Whenever that was. A long, long time ago.”

She watches him sift through the pages, contemplative. Something about seeing his hands—his beautiful, straight-boned human hands—makes something in her uncurl, just a little, rather like a summer rose.

“How did we meet, Adam?”

He looks up, surprised. “You know that story well enough.”

“No.” Her look is flinty. “No, I don’t.”

Her eyes stray back to his hands on the book. She remembers when they didn’t look like that—when there were claws, then, that joined with her hands, and took her away to the old windmill, where her mother’s things sat covered in dust. And there were drawings, there, too….

“Adam. How did we meet.” And a breeze touches her cheek, a breeze straight out of winter: but that cannot be possible, because it is June.

“Oh, all right, fine. Once upon a time there was a handsome prince, and he was a complete git, and he taxed someone-or-other—I don’t remember who—to fill his castle with beautiful objects, and then he was cursed (and rightly, too!); and everything was terrible. His poor staff. His poor…everybody, really.”

“And then? and then what?” 

Adam shrugs. “And then you came. And I locked you in a room—because, again, git—but fortunately you’re a saint, and stayed around. And saved my life. At least twice—three times, if we’re counting the paper-cut incident.”

“Saved you from…?”

“Do you truly enjoy hearing me sing your praises? Fine, as I enjoy singing them. First from wolves, because _unbelievably_ you were trying to run away from the git, and then from death-by-musket.”

“_None_ of this makes _sense_,” Belle says through gritted teeth.

“It’s a fairytale, dear. My maître d’ was a candelabra. It’s not meant to confine itself to logic.”

“No,” hisses Belle. “Listen. I came to the castle: why? I run away from the castle: why? I come back to the sound of a musket: but why did I leave in the first place?”

Adam pulls at his hair, twists one end around a finger. “You’re fearless. You were living an adventure.”

“For no one,” says Belle. “I came from no one, and I returned to no one. It makes no sense. My whole world is this castle.”

“Thank god,” says Adam, but he doesn’t sound relieved. He sees the worry plucking away at his beloved. And, suddenly, he feels worried too.

The white roses in the arbor drop their petals to the ground. Belle does not know why she is weeping.


	3. Chapter 3

Lumiere doesn’t know why, but everyone seems so _sad_. There’s all the manic joy of palace life, as ever—the balls, the fetes, the roses and gilded mirrors and clean-swept marble halls—but he hears weeping or sighing around every corner, and his friends keep staring toward the forest with frightened eyes.

“What is it, Plumette?” he begs. “Is it the wolves?”

Plumette doesn’t know either. She isn’t streaked by sadness. “Chapeau says all the drawers on his desk are locked. And he can’t imagine why.”

“Locked drawers with no keys? Forests full of wolves?” He can’t comprehend it. Back in Paris, they saw no sadness such as this. In Lumiere’s memory, his ma and papa thrive as bright as life, surrounded by candles and the smell of city smoke. And he knows that his darling Plumette remembers plague, and pretty palaces, and families and dancing-shoes: but never such a lost feeling as this, as if every compass points the wrong way. 

He scouts around to see what is missing. Do they need another ball? A grand gala, with a feast as grand as the court?

_Non, non_: all the answers are incomprehensible to him. Mrs. Potts wants a plain, ordinary plate; he says she wants ordinary tea, with a stick of wild lemongrass in it, brewed on a summer stoop. Chapeau wants a small attic room, and a stack of letters that smell like lavender, and one long lace-trimmed ribbon to wind around the pages. Chip wants a particular hiding-spot in the kitchen he says he cannot find anymore: a spot beneath the corner table, though there has never been a table in the corner and Chip knows it. _But he knows it was there, he knows!_

And Belle. With an invention in one hand, but no power to make it go. _  
_

_Lumiere, hand me the—no—the….oh, Lumiere, for god’s sake!   
_

Every guess he makes is wrong. But she cannot tell him what part she needs to make her music-box chime.

She cannot tell him where she learned to make a music-box, either. Or why it plays the same tune, _ad infinitum, _breaking in the same spot every time_. _

Belle sings the words to a lullaby that no one taught her.


	4. Chapter 4

Adam cannot stand it. He cannot stand to see his beloved’s heart keep breaking.

He slips out of the palace at dusk, his blue coat shrouded around him. Belle is in her library, staring around at the stacks and stacks of impossible books, trying to reconcile the only world she knows to the vision she keeps having; a barren church, a shelf of seven books, a face she never sees. 

He takes Philippe. The white horse is still his favorite.

“Don’t go alone,” says a voice behind him, and he turns. The staff, his small adopted family, stand behind him. 

“Go where?” he asks. He knows they don’t have answers. There is nothing beyond these green, grim woods with all their gray-packed wolves. 

“I’m going,” says Mrs. Potts. 

“You’ll catch your death of cold,” says Cogsworth.

Chapeau nods, once.

“Will you leave Belle behind?” Plumette is concerned. She cannot understand the silent sorrow of the palace, but she knows acts done for love. She remembers a battle, once—though who they were battling she cannot conceive—and the last touch of her wing across Lumiere’s face.

She hands Adam a heavier coat. 

The little troop rides away—Adam, Chapeau, Mrs. Potts and Chip, Cogsworth. Garderobe and Cadenza and Lumiere and Plumette stand on the palace steps and wave. 

“There is nothing there for them to find,” says Maestro Cadenza. “There never was beyond those woods.”

And yet they hear a music-box, somehow. 

* * *

Maurice the painter—only a paintbrush now—stares out the window of a house in Villeneuve.

It grows too late. It grows too dark. The villagers are growing silent, one by one. Alléchant won’t speak. Forgeron cannot remember what he was. The accordion in the tavern has lost her name. 

Maurice hopes that she’ll remember. He hopes someone will come.

But his moment grows so very, very short.


	5. Chapter 5

“Didn’t I used to walk here, unabated, and not be scared of wolves?”

Nobody answers him. It’s too cold. Adam holds his lantern high. A downed tree seems to point the way—but beyond the tree, he sees a road. 

“That can’t be right,” Mrs. Potts protests, holding her sleeping son in the crook of her saddle. 

“Look,” says Cogsworth, and points to a broken music box, half-buried in mud. 

Adam slips from his seat to inspect it. Cradling it in his hands, he brings it over to Chapeau. It’s battered beyond belief, but everyone can make out a shape—a shattered windmill, its sails all broken off. 

Chapeau nudges open the doors. A little toy painter falls out—and a little baby, barely an inch high, tucked in the arms of her mama, sits in Adam’s hands.

“A family! Look at that, Chip, a family.” Mrs. Potts flushes with delight. “Everyone should have a papa, even little toys—” She breaks off quickly. 

Chip is too sleepy to have heard a word. He nuzzles back into her shawl.

“Who could have made such a thing? Belle is the only one who knows how.” Adam turns it over. 

“Could she have discarded it here, sir?” asks Cogsworth. 

“No, unless she had it with her when she came—the first time….” Again, that conversation in the rose garden. _I came to the castle: why? I run away from the castle: why?_

“Why did Belle come to the castle?” He’s surprised when it slips past his lips. He’s more surprised when his staff have no answers. 

They leave the little toy painter in the snow. But Adam holds the windmill close: and tries to remember where Belle came from, when she had lost her Paris life and had no one there to understand.


	6. Chapter 6

“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,” says Mrs. Potts, low. The wind has been blowing keenly in her back for some hours now, but she has a feeling—unrooted in these great, grim trees—that somehow, they must be near the village at last.

_But there is no village in this part of the woods,_ says another part of her, more reasonable. She holds her boy close. And then—quite suddenly—the woods end. A little-used road bends down the hill to a silent cluster of buildings. 

“A clocktower,” says Cogsworth suddenly, and then stops. Everyone sits quiet behind him, not even the horses whickering. 

Adam breathes out. A little town. Like Belle had said.

“Let’s go wake it up,” he says, and rides down to the village square.

* * *

Nothing moves in the marketplace. Frost creeps over the abandoned anvils, the broken swords, the plates and cups and ribbons lining empty stalls. A door hangs open here or there, but whoever lived here seems to have vanished, overnight, as quick as a thought. 

Chip wakes up. “Is there a donkey?” he murmurs sleepily, seeing a half-slumped crockery stall, but he loses the idea as quick as he found it. 

Everyone slides off the horses, walking through the disarray, lost. 

“Too late,” says Cogsworth, staring up at the clock. It does not match his time. He tucks his pocket watch away, stepping over a bent fish-hook clawed into the ground. On second thought, he picks the fish-hook up; tucks it into his pocket too, to sit beside his watch. No point in letting the sharp old thing scratch anybody.

Chapeau picks up ribbons from the ground, and touches an old hatstand very gently.

There’s a cold wind blowing through the doors of the church, and the pages of a torn book blow, tumbleweed-style, over the steps and down to Adam’s feet.

Crumpled pages from _Romeo and Juliet_. Mercutio’s death.

_A plague o’ both your houses! I am sped. Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm. A plague o’ both your houses!_

The town is as quiet as a cemetery. Adam stands and stares at the graves.


	7. Chapter 7

“Here is the church, here is the steeple….” Chip, set down by his mother in a fit of wakefulness, hop-scotches up the church’s steps. Behind him, the grown-ups pace and pick up and put down again, and furrow their old brows; the little boy skips through the village, following his own footprints—stamped in the snow before him, as if they’ve been there a long, long time—up through old haunts with no one to haunt them. 

The church is empty. Chip stands alone, calling out through the dust and the blown-in snow: “Where’s all the people?”

The alter doesn’t answer him. He skips back out—past his mother holding up a plate, and scrubbing it on her skirt, and rubbing her finger along its striped-pattern rim—and finds a garden full of cabbages, still somehow green under all the winter snow. 

The door of the odd little house hangs open. Chip goes inside. 

Everywhere, on every wall, across every table, are paintings of Belle. Sketches of her as a child are pinned to the walls. Vivid renderings of her, in the dress she wore the day the curse ended and everyone danced, are piled up on the floor, in a heedless mess untouched by human hands. The drawings lay so thick that Chip must shuffle through them, as if they’re autumn leaves rasping across the ground.

Every drawing leads to the table. Abandoned gears and tools and toys fall off it; and there, in a pile of paintings so numerous and frantic and filled with so much love, sits a paintbrush. It rests on a blank sheet of paper, as if it had just begun a thought. But there’s nothing for it to say—just the curve of Belle’s eye, barely sketched, the brush dropped before it could finish the stroke. 

Belle looks down at Chip from every drawing. And something creeps along the little boy’s skin.

He grabs the pile, indistinctly, snatching up a few random drawings to take back to Belle. He runs from the house, letting the door slam behind him, nearly tripping over a hen coop as he scatters from the path of the curse. He senses remorse, from the dead things; he senses passionate regret, for rage and hate and violence; and, worst of all, he senses nothing at all. Whatever felt those things is gone, and left behind drawings of a girl they never knew. Or don’t know they never knew. Or don’t know they don’t know anything at all. 

Chip is crying, harsh and fierce, and the painter’s house is empty.


	8. Chapter 8

They leave the things. Adam watches as the servants pack a few small things whose loss won’t matter to anybody. Chapeau ties hatstands to his horse, and oddly detailed swords, and a spicerack that was sitting—for no known reason—among a pile of fairy-stories, little myths, the ones where love conquers all and no one runs out of time. 

Chip doesn’t tell anyone about the house. He huddles behind his mother, and stacks horseshoes silently.

“We can’t take it all,” says Mrs Potts. “But it won’t do anyone who ever lived here any good to just leave these things, in the snow and the rot and the wind.”

She slides a plate into chip’s hands. He nearly drops it.

Chip doesn’t say anything. Tears streak Chapeau’s face. He doesn’t know why.

They leave the village, and the wind howls behind them as they go; a wind from the mountains, angry and sharp-nosed and blue with rage and cold. Adam pulls his coat more snug around him. And when he looks back, the village is gone—the sleet and wind shielding it, never to be found by the world again. 

“_Something_ is wrong,” says Adam. “_Something_ has cursed us—them—us.”

“Not us,” says Mrs. Potts. “We’re fine. We’re fine as ever we were, luv.”

But she holds her son very, very close, and the knot in her voice doesn’t sound like it believes her. 

When they get back to the palace, Belle runs to meet them. And for a moment, her face framed in white roses, her face is a picture of hope: and then she sees the horses that didn’t come, and the people who aren’t there, and how all her life is tied up in the same old people she’s remembered forever. her eyes, blank, wander across the junk tied to their saddles.

“Where’d all this come from?” she asks.

“Where did we find it?” asks Adam, looking back at the staff. They shake their heads. The don’t remember. They went into the woods, and came out again. 

The families stick the rubbish in the bottom of their drawers, and they forget again, and Chip keeps his crying for when his mother can’t hear him.


	9. Chapter 9

A year later, and tired lines frame Belle’s face, and her invention-shed lies empty, devoid of purpose. Looking for something to do—and tired of the paintings in the portrait-gallery, and all their bad-sketched lines, and her searching for a face not among all of Adam’s relatives—Belle wanders to the back of the garden, where Chip keeps a secret box among the broken garden-pots.

It smells thick of herbs, back here, thyme and dill and the sun off of tomato-leaves. Belle stretches, and sighs, and reaches down to feel the rhyme of the earth—the rich black soil reminding her of cabbages, and wooden fences, and other things she thinks she must have read about at some point or another. And then—knowing he won’t mind her peeping, knowing that the boy has been crying, hoping to do some good in a world that’s lost just a little of its scent—Belle takes the lid off the old tea-box, and sees what Chip has been sorrowing over.

Her face. Her eyes. A blotch that might be her nose. Ink and pen and pencil, all of Belle, from the time she was so little her feet would fit in the palm of a hand. Stuffed in the box, crumpled from useless hands, strokes and strokes capturing Belle’s face. 

She gasps, turning over the sheaves.

The artist is a master. He never signs his name—humble, scared, running out of time, who knows the reason why—but he takes every detail seriously, like crafting up a prayer from pen and paper: the way her freckles burned her face the summer she was ten; the scar she got, just under her ear, from that time she fell off the chicken coop. She sees sketches of the boots she bought herself when she’d just turned sixteen, angles of her she never knew anyone had ever seen. The love in these pages makes her hands shake. These are records of a past she didn’t know she had.

Clutching the box, she runs to Adam—heels hitting hard against the ground as she passes Cogsworth, melancholy on the back terrace; toes skidding as she flies past Chapeau, searching out his bow from where he’d abandoned it. Adam catches her in his arms as she careens into the library, arms locked against her chest, all those precious papers held fast in her hands.

“Look, look!” She lays them out, panic and wonder edging into each other, as the papers tumble across the desk, and Adam has to shuffle them to see straight. “Where did he find them?”

Adam shakes his head. “We never found anyone when we went into the woods.”

“You must have. Search your memory! Who painted these things? Did you meet someone, out there in the snow?”

Adam’s hands brush across a little painted windmill—a trinket he keeps on his desk, for no real reason; where he found it he doesn’t quite know—and shakes his head. “I tried, Belle. I did try. But I would remember if we met anyone in the snow, or left anyone behind.” 

She whisks the papers away, and runs off to her room. She lays them on her bed, and traces out the lifetime written in this unknown hand—and papers keep falling out of the little blue tea-box, as if there can never be enough, as if there are never enough ways to draw love out onto the paper.


	10. Chapter 10

Belle walks into the woods, holding love tight in her arms. 

She feels a gust of frost across her cheek, and turns away from it: she doesn’t want the adventure snow promises on a sunny day. She doesn’t want, right now, that great wide somewhere of the palace she leaves behind. And though the mountains call to her—_curses! enchantments! a whole new story!_—Belle wants to build the old one, wants to find the past drawn on this wrinkled paper by some old hand. 

She finds a hill in the wood, covered thick over with late-blooming blue flowers, and sits among the tiny blue stars, papers spread around her like a sun.

The smell of snow dies away. The blue sky stretches out huge, above her, and she remembers, sharp and quick, that day she ran up this hill and threw her hands out to the horizon: _I want it more than I can tell! _

Looking back across the hill, she sees a blur to the south: what might be a clocktower, if the haze of the mountains weren’t so thick and hid it all in mist. She runs back to the memory: the running up the hill: the running from something: the running _back_ to something. 

Belle, sitting in a meadow specked with flowers, closes her eyes and conjures up a spell from her own heart.

Her spell is tied up in her running brown boots; it’s tied up in love; it’s tied up in going home, in inventing that home out of the nothing scraps she has in front of her. She lays out the pieces in front of her, as someone taught her, and turns the scraps of paper—the servants’ pain—Chip’s abandoned tea box—the tears they let nobody hear—into gears and screws and tools, building up the thing no one can look at. Hands that paint, hearts that love, an old man’s blue eyes staring at her through the shadows of her home. 

Belle jumps. What was _that? _

The paper is blowing in the wind, but it’s not the frosty wind of earlier: now she smells summer cabbages, and jam, and the dust of horses’ hooves. Gasping, she shuts her eyes tight, clutches the tools in front of her, and remembers like it is all that matters in the world.

The house with the crooked stoop. The church with its small bookshelf. The village drunk, shoved into the tiny country jail. The smell of bread wafting from someone’s house. Calls in the marketplace—the twirl of the skirts—the muddy well water, the potter’s donkey, pointed roofs pointing up to the sky. Beth. Jean. Alléchant. Clothilde. Stanley. Maurice.

The sky cracks open above her, light so bright and blinding Belle falls back, the air knocked out of her, crushing the forget-me-nots under her. The pages whip and froth and there’s a hurricane on the hill, and the mountains moan, and the mist cries out like the death of a witch.

And when she looks up, blue eyes look back at her, and Maurice’s hands shake a little with the joy of it. 

* * *

At the palace, Cogsworth finds Clothilde exploding from his waistcoat pocket, ripping it to pieces as she goes. Chapeau takes a hat off the hatstand and finds his mother’s face beneath it. One moment, LeFou is standing before the fireplace, admiring the decorative swords hung above it; the next, Stanley has fallen into his arms, looking shocked as always at his good luck.

Adam meets Belle and Maurice at the gates, panting, his cravat undone. “You found him!” he calls. “You found them! You found home!” 

Belle beams and hugs her father. She never wants to let him go.

That night, they hold a banquet. Lumiere and Plumette make a quick run to the village for supplies, digging around in now-sunny cupboards for forgotten jams, new-made breads, butters still golden as corn. Jean Potts won’t stop swinging Chip around, Beatrice won’t stop laughing. Villagers swarm every room, drinking coffee, holding court, finding family in every corner. 

Belle sits with Maurice in the library, showing him her books, showing him passages she marked out for him when she still didn’t know who she wanted to show them to. He’s still a little shaky—still a little frightened—he, too, remembers, and he remembers falling numb, he remembers being unable to finish that last sketch. He remembers falling to the tabletop, brushes useless.

“It’s all right, papa,” she murmurs. “I remembered.”

He smiles at her. “I still don’t see how.”

She shakes her head at him. “You don’t need to see, Papa. You already saw. You put so much love into me it couldn’t help sprouting out, somehow, someday. It wasn’t me that broke the curse. It was your love.” 

She hands him the sketches—all crumpled now, the ink running. He’ll have to start anew, make new ones, studying her as she runs and yells and reads. He has all the time in the world to do that, now. All the time to keep on loving her, as he always has. _  
_

_Make this last forever,_ he thinks. As he thinks it, he knows it won’t happen—memories fade, minutes pass, girls grow up and fall in love. But this moment was here, he had it. He made it. Somehow, he had made a daughter who could outlast a memory. He didn’t know such a thing was possible.

The whole world was possible, now, the whole world was alive with baking bread and home. Somewhere, Chip was calling. Chapeau’s sisters wanted paintings, portraits. Adam was wondering if Maurice could put a little toy painter back into the windmill he keeps on his desk. The windows were open, and the light was coming in.

Why stick to a moment, when all of life is right there in front of you? 

Maurice kisses Belle’s forehead, and steps forward into life. 

_the end _


End file.
